There is a biological controversy of long standing between proponents of the Wilsonian view that all organisms of a certain class have at least one part that is a cell and proponents of the contradictory, or Dobellian, view that some organisms in the same class have no parts that are cells. The controversy is considered from the standpoint of the methodology of explication. It is concluded that on the grounds of prevalent biological usage, precision, utility and generality the Wilsonian view (...) may be defended successfully against attacks that have been made upon it. (shrink)

Roger Penrose, in _The Emperor's New Mind_ (1989), writes about the way Mozart perceived music. Mozart did not play a piece in his mind in real time, or even speeded up, but could hold it before him all at once. We all do this, although usually for much shorter riffs than entire symphonies. I have argued that the all-at-onceness of our thoughts and perceptions is at least as inexplicable as what it is like to see red; I think the aural/temporal (...) all-at-onceness makes the point at least as vividly as the visual/spatial all-at-onceness of the curl of smoke in an art nouveau poster. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, (...) and, though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, (...) and, though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

Techniques for achieving moral enhancement will modify brain processes to produce what is alleged to be more moral conduct. Neurophilosophy and neuroethics must ponder what “moral enhancement” could possibly be, if possible at all. Objections to the very possibility of moral enhancement, raised from various philosophical and neuroscientific standpoints, fail to justify skepticism, but they do place serious constraints on the kinds of efficacious moral enhancers. While there won't be a “morality pill,” and hopes for global moral enlightenment will remain (...) hopes, there will be a large variety of behavioral modifiers described as enhancers of some aspect of morality or another according to prevailing social norms. The most likely moral enhancers that will be designed, tested, and marketed in the near future will attempt to alleviate seriously immoral and illegal behavior. Some enhancers diminishing antisocial conduct and a few designed to elevate moral conduct above normal levels will also become available, although their widespread use is doubtful. There will also be specialized modifications for enhancing whatever an individual personally regards as moral, and for enabling better performance by a person in an operational role. A measure of skepticism toward all the proposed kinds of moral enhancement is advised, and where political implementation of moral enhancers is concerned, a healthy amount of cynicism as well. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Intermediaries, such as accountants, lawyers, and bankers, are gatekeepers, which are parties whose cooperation is necessary for corporations to function and who, by withholding cooperation, are able to prevent significant corporate misconduct. The recent scandals at Enron and other corporations were due, in part, to failures by gatekeeper institutions. However, intermediaries exist primarily to provide for-fee services and not specifically to detect and deter misconduct. Insofar as these institutions are gatekeepers or guardians, they serve reluctantly. Hence the question: What is (...) the responsibility of intermediaries to act as gatekeepers? This article argues that the appropriate moral, as well as legal, principle for justifying responsibility in a gatekeeper role is cost effectiveness. This conclusion is reached by means of a hypothetical exercise called the investors’ bargain in which investors—who bear the costs and receive the benefits of intermediaries’ gatekeeper role—are asked to choose the best means of protecting their interests. (shrink)

Intermediaries, such as accountants, lawyers, and bankers, are gatekeepers, which are parties whose cooperation is necessary for corporations to function and who, by withholding cooperation, are able to prevent significant corporate misconduct. The recent scandals at Enron and other corporations were due, in part, to failures by gatekeeper institutions. However, intermediaries exist primarily to provide for-fee services and not specifically to detect and deter misconduct. Insofar asthese institutions are gatekeepers or guardians, they serve reluctantly. Hence the question: What is the (...) responsibility of intermediaries to act as gatekeepers? This article argues that the appropriate moral, as well as legal, principle for justifying responsibility in a gatekeeper role is cost effectiveness. This conclusion is reached by means of a hypothetical exercise called the investors’ bargain in which investors—who bear the costs and receive the benefits of intermediaries’ gatekeeper role—are asked to choose the best means of protecting their interests. (shrink)

John R. Schneider explores the problem that animal suffering, caused by the inherent nature of Darwinian evolution, poses to belief in theism. Examining the aesthetic aspects of this moral problem, Schneider focuses on the three prevailing approaches to it: that the Fall caused animal suffering in nature (Lapsarian Theodicy), that Darwinian evolution was the only way for God to create an acceptably good and valuable world (Only-Way Theodicy), and that evolution is the source of major, God-justifying beauty (Aesthetic Theodicy). (...) He also uses canonical texts and doctrines from Judaism and Christianity - notably the book of Job, and the doctrines of the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection - to build on insights taken from the non-lapsarian alternative approaches. Schneider thus constructs an original, God-justifying account of God and the evolutionary suffering of animals. His book enables readers to see that the Darwinian configuration of animal suffering unveiled by scientists is not as implausible on Christian theism as commonly supposed. (shrink)

Anne Conway rejects the view that creatures are essentially members of any natural kind more specific than the kind 'creature'. That is, she rejects essentialism about species membership. This chapter provides an analysis of one of Anne Conway's arguments against such essentialism, which (as I argue) is drawn from metaethical rather than metaphysical premises. In her view, if a creature's species or kind were inscribed in its essence, that essence would constitute a limit on the creature's potential to participate in (...) the divine good. It is this consideration that ultimately leads her to reject essentialism about species membership. The chapter concludes with an examination of some of the metaethical consequences of Conway's view as well as a lesson it can teach us about ideal adviser accounts of the good. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Intermediaries, such as accountants, lawyers, and bankers, are gatekeepers, which are parties whose cooperation is necessary for corporations to function and who, by withholding cooperation, are able to prevent significant corporate misconduct. The recent scandals at Enron and other corporations were due, in part, to failures by gatekeeper institutions. However, intermediaries exist primarily to provide for-fee services and not specifically to detect and deter misconduct. Insofar as these institutions are gatekeepers or guardians, they serve reluctantly. Hence the question: What is (...) the responsibility of intermediaries to act as gatekeepers? This article argues that the appropriate moral, as well as legal, principle for justifying responsibility in a gatekeeper role is cost effectiveness. This conclusion is reached by means of a hypothetical exercise called the investors’ bargain in which investors—who bear the costs and receive the benefits of intermediaries’ gatekeeper role—are asked to choose the best means of protecting their interests. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Financial markets Financial services Financial management.

The human cognitive architecture consists of a set of largely independent modules associated with different brain regions. This book discusses in detail how these various modules can combine to produce behaviours as varied as driving a car and solving an algebraic equation.

Foreword I. Critical rationalism is a genuinely new philosophical perspective. It is not, however, one systematic view. The development of it by Popper and ...

Can the output of human cognition be predicted from the assumption that it is an optimal response to the information-processing demands of the environment? A methodology called rational analysis is described for deriving predictions about cognitive phenomena using optimization assumptions. The predictions flow from the statistical structure of the environment and not the assumed structure of the mind. Bayesian inference is used, assuming that people start with a weak prior model of the world which they integrate with experience to develop (...) stronger models of specific aspects of the world. Cognitive performance maximizes the difference between the expected gain and cost of mental effort. Memory performance can be predicted on the assumption that retrieval seeks a maximal trade-off between the probability of finding the relevant memories and the effort required to do so; in categorization performance there is a similar trade-off between accuracy in predicting object features and the cost of hypothesis formation; in casual inference the trade-off is between accuracy in predicting future events and the cost of hypothesis formation; and in problem solving it is between the probability of achieving goals and the cost of both external and mental problem-solving search. The implemention of these rational prescriptions in neurally plausible architecture is also discussed. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, written especially for this volume, many of the most prominent scholars on Dewey are inspired to search for that new enlightenment that Dewey himself sought, reconfigured to deal with the pressing problems of our times.

Naturalism is widely regarded as the dominant philosophical worldview in the West. The prestige of science and the power of technology have driven naturalism to prominence, even as deep questions mount on all sides. In this volume of all new essays, prominent philosophers consider a wide variety of challenges to naturalism, proposing improved defenses and novel developments in this influential worldview. Some essays question whether naturalism is a unified philosophy, and try to determine how one or another variety of naturalism (...) has an advantage. Other essays defend naturalism's approaches to religion, the mind, experience, morality, and society. To ensure that naturalism has a strong future, this volume's authors are determined to help reformulate its principles for the 21st century. Among the contributors are Mario Bunge, Paul Kurtz, John Lachs, Isaac Levi, Joseph Margolis, Nicholas Rescher, John R. Shook, and other leading philosophers. (shrink)

The title of The Rediscovery of the Mind suggests the question "When was the mind lost?" Since most people may not be aware that it ever was lost, we must also then ask "Who lost it?" It was lost, of course, only by philosophers, by certain philosophers. This passed unnoticed by society at large. The "rediscovery" is also likely to pass unnoticed. But has the mind been rediscovered by the same philosophers who "lost" it? Probably not. John Searle is (...) an analytic philosopher, with some of the same notions as the positivists and behaviorists who rejected consciousness and "lost" the mind in the first place, but he also does not sound like the kind of reductionist who would have joined that crowd. His views, indeed, are sensible enough, and some of his insights so important, that it is a shame to find his thought profoundly limited by some of the same mistakes and prejudices that ruined philosophy, and not just philosophy of mind, under the influence of those positivists and behaviorists. There is enough of genuine value in his treatment, that it can easily be taken up and, with relatively slight modification, added to what is of permanent value in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require..

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, (...) etc. And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

The appropriate methodology for psychological research depends on whether one is studying mental algorithms or their implementation. Mental algorithms are abstract specifications of the steps taken by procedures that run in the mind. Implementational issues concern the speed and reliability of these procedures. The algorithmic level can be explored only by studying across-task variation. This contrasts with psychology's dominant methodology of looking for within-task generalities, which is appropriate only for studying implementational issues.The implementation-algorithm distinction is related to a number of (...) other “levels” considered in cognitive science. Its realization in Anderson's ACT theory of cognition is discussed. Research at the algorithmic level is more promising because it is hard to make further fundamental scientific progress at the implementational level with the methodologies available. Protocol data, which are appropriate only for algorithm-level theories, provide a richer source than data at the implementational level. Research at the algorithmic level will also yield more insight into fundamental properties of human knowledge because it is the level at which significant learning transitions are defined.The best way to study the algorithmic level is to look for differential learning outcomes in pedagogical experiments that manipulate instructional experience. This provides control and prediction in realistically complex learning situations. The intelligent tutoring paradigm provides a particularly fruitful way to implement such experiments.The implications of this analysis for the issue of modularity of mind, the status of language, research on human/computer interaction, and connectionist models are also examined. (shrink)

Designed to fill a large gap in American philosophy scholarship, this bibliography covers the first four decades of the pragmatic movement. It references most of the philosophical works by the twelve major figures of pragmatism: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George H. Mead, F.C.S. Schiller, Giovanni Papini, Giovanni Vailati, Guiseppe Prezzolini, Mario Calderoni, A.W. Moore, John E. Boodin, and C.I. Lewis. It also includes writings of dozens of minor pragmatic writers, along with those by commentators and (...) critics of pragmatism. It encompasses literature not only concerning pragmatism as an alliance of philosophical theories of meaning, inquiry, belief, knowledge, logic, truth, ontology, value, and morality, but also as an intellectual and cultural force impacting art, literature, education, the social and natural sciences, religion, and politics. This bibliography contains 2,794 main entries and more than 2,000 additional references, organized by year of publication. 2,101 of the references include annotation. Its international scope is focused on writings in English, French, German, and Italian, though many other languages are also represented. Peter H. Hare contributed the Guest Preface. The introduction contains an historical orientation to pragmatism and guides to recent studies of pragmatic figures. This work is extensively cross-referenced, and it has exhaustive and lengthy author and subject indexes. (shrink)

Newell proposed that cognitive theories be developed in an effort to satisfy multiple criteria and to avoid theoretical myopia. He provided two overlapping lists of 13 criteria that the human cognitive architecture would have to satisfy in order to be functional. We have distilled these into 12 criteria: flexible behavior, real-time performance, adaptive behavior, vast knowledge base, dynamic behavior, knowledge integration, natural language, learning, development, evolution, and brain realization. There would be greater theoretical progress if we evaluated theories by a (...) broad set of criteria such as these and attended to the weaknesses such evaluations revealed. To illustrate how theories can be evaluated we apply these criteria to both classical connectionism and the ACT-R theory. The strengths of classical connectionism on this test derive from its intense effort in addressing empirical phenomena in such domains as language and cognitive development. Its weaknesses derive from its failure to acknowledge a symbolic level to thought. In contrast, ACT-R includes both symbolic and subsymbolic components. The strengths of the ACT-R theory derive from its tight integration of the symbolic component with the subsymbolic component. Its weaknesses largely derive from its failure, as yet, to adequately engage in intensive analyses of issues related to certain criteria on Newell's list. Key Words: cognitive architecture; connectionism; hybrid systems; language; learning; symbolic systems. (shrink)